Lightspeed Issue 33

by Tad Williams

  After that I will probably see if I have enough poems outside the Red King poems for another book, and I’ll start fooling with a new novel. And I should mention that forthcoming from Mercer are two novels, Glimmerglass (a mad tale about a failed artist who begins to glimpse what she thinks is the muse in the woods near her home) and Maze of Blood (the curious outgrowth of a fascination with the deep-South life of Robert E. Howard.) In addition, Mercer will be putting out a paperback edition of A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and bringing Catherwood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996) back into print.

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, and Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Daily Science Fiction, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her husband, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

  Author Spotlight: Genevieve Valentine

  Christie Yant

  “The Little Mermaid” is among my favorite fairy tales, largely because it is so dark and tragic. You’ve brought her—or something like her—back here in an even darker form. How did this story come together for you?

  I’ve always thought that at heart “The Little Mermaid” was something of a proof against love. It’s more a story of desperation, and escape, and a sort of casual cruelty no one in the story can really help—it’s a cruel story because it’s just the nature of things to be cruel. I wanted to explore the themes of isolation and terrible transformation, and adjust the vectors of yearning a little.

  “It seems truer than the other stories they tell you,” as Matthew says when he reads the story of the Prince. What do you think makes fairy tales such an excellent medium for truth?

  I think fairy tales have several different levels of truth, in different levels of intent. “Little Red Riding Hood” is an entertaining adventure story about a wily girl in the woods who outsmarts a wild creature; it’s a story about sexual awakening; it’s a look at family relationships; it’s a catchall warning for girls entering the great and terrible world. As the story developed and a woodsman was added to rob Little Red of her own escape, the story became a new, more unintentional truth about what the world thought the role of girls would be. It’s amazing how much can be found in such a small story; it’s no wonder they’ve endured.

  People have been writing about mermaids for at least three thousand years, in almost every culture, and recently there has been a resurgence in interest in them. What do you think draws us back to the myths of the sea and the depths, especially now that our sea-faring days are largely behind us?

  Maybe for exactly that reason; the depths of the sea are an immediate mystery. The sea is tangible but treacherous, familiar and unknown, a bountiful source of food and an open road to trade that would nevertheless have zero hesitation swallowing your ship. Beautiful fishwomen who drag you to your death seem like an inevitable personification of the allure and danger of the sea. Any resurgence might be due partly to the idea that as we learn more about space, it trades some of its myth for more clinical interest, making the ocean once again a romantic prospect—though as someone who thinks discovering more about things only increases their appeal, I’m probably not going to fight for that thesis very hard, let’s be honest. It might just be that the wheel of mythical-creature trends has turned, and the mermaid is up, and in a year or two, satyrs will be sweeping pop culture!

  The theme of tragic obsession is something that appears in different ways throughout your body of work, including your novel Mechanique and your recent story in Nightmare magazine. What brings you back to that theme, and what other themes do you find yourself wanting to explore?

  I think obsession is the kernel of so many stories; for every obvious Moby Dick narrative, there’s a cop who has a case they’re determined to crack, a loner who discovers a social cause. Obsession means that what propels the plot will also, by nature, reveal character, and the fact that it can be used so many ways to reveal both the beautiful and the repulsive makes it endlessly interesting to me. I’m also pretty sure that whatever my inventory of stories about movies, there’s always going to be another one. (Everyone’s shocked, I’m sure.)

  This is your fourth appearance in Lightspeed, and I hope that many readers have discovered your work through our pages. Your first novel, Mechanique, was nominated for a Nebula award and won the Crawford award. I heard recently that you have some good news for your fans. Care to let our readers know what’s coming up for you?

  Yes! Fittingly in the fairy-tale vein, I suppose, I’ve just sold my most recent novel, a historical mainstream reimagining of the Twelve Dancing Princesses set in 1927 New York, to Atria; it has been a blast to research and write, and I’m very excited. I also have some short fiction coming up at Tor.com, Eclipse Online, The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, and Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells, among others; and as always, my quest to hit the max limit on the Netflix Instant Queue continues.

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, and Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine. Her fiction has appeared in magazines such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, and Daily Science Fiction, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her husband, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on Twitter @christieyant.

  Author Spotlight: M. Bennardo

  Robyn Lupo

  What were the initial germinations for “The Herons of Mer de l’Ouest”?

  The first inkling I had of this story came when I was visiting a heron rookery (or, technically, a “heronry”) in my home state of Ohio with my mother. Herons are very nervous, and they often respond to intruders by vomiting down on them—which is both unpleasant for the visitors and very bad for the birds. So we were only allowed to visit because it was winter and the nests were empty.

  Up above in the bare trees were these enormous nests—not as big as an eagle’s nest, but still very impressive. And underfoot were bits of small animals the herons had fed to their young. You could actually sift through the leaves on the ground and find small bones. It was a scene that made an impression on me, and I filed it away for future use.

  The other spark came was when I read a reference to Mer de l’Ouest in Ken Jennings’s book on maps, Maphead. This so-called “Sea of the West” was a huge imaginary bay that was essentially invented by 18th-century mapmakers (though rumors and wishful thinking had persisted for centuries before that) and which covered the entire Pacific Northwest. In fact, this bay was considered a state secret for decades—France didn’t want any of the other colonial powers to know about this shortcut across the continent that they believed they had found, so they suppressed the news of its existence. It only became widely known when a stolen map was copied—and then, of course, the whole thing turned out to be totally imaginary.

  All in all, it seemed like a fantastic place to set a story—this legendary, nonexistent location where presumably anything could happen.

  Solitude and themes thereof seem to be the motivating emotion in this story. What was it about loneliness that drew you to write about it?

  I’m fascinated by people who live and travel without safety nets. In my life, I’m always walking well-worn paths and always within easy call of other people. The most isolated I’ve ever been in my life was on a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, and even then I was no farther than fifteen or twenty miles from the outfitter who had rented us our gear. Even if all our gear and food had sunk in a lake, the result would have been mere inconvenience—maybe a cold night, a hungry day, and a long walk.

  So the idea that there are places where help is just entirely out of reach is really compelling to me. Reading about early Antarctic expeditions or sea voyages—or ev
en the Apollo flights to the Moon—you realize how much these people were taking their lives in their hands. Their journeys were often based on theories that left little room for errors. There could come a point, as with Scott’s ill-fated trek to the South Pole, when they realized days ahead of time that they miscalculated and they weren’t going to make it. But most of the time, they would still keep going.

  This story is not exactly about that. I think it’s more about a guy who wants to be on that kind of journey, but who finds he just can’t get far enough away from civilization. He keeps trying to remove himself from the world, but he finds that there’s always somebody else waiting for him over the horizon. Which I hope is a hopeful message in the end.

  Can you tell us more about your choice of setting? In that same vein, one does not typically think of birds as being predators. What led you to this idea? Which came first, the setting or the predator?

  The two ideas arose independently. I get lots of half-ideas for stories that just hang out in my head until I find two or three that go together in an interesting way. For this story, the setting and the predators were two separate ideas that clicked together. The third idea behind this story was that I wanted to write a monster story where the characters couldn’t communicate, and had to find other ways besides talking to develop their trust and coordination.

  In fact, I’ve used a couple of those ideas more than once in different mixtures. I wrote another story with a heron as the “monster”—but that one was from a frog’s point of view (“The Famous Fabre Fly Caper” from The Journal of Unlikely Entomology). And I used the idea of characters unable to speak to each in another monster story, but that time in a monastery with a partial vow of silence (“After Compline, Silence Falls” from Beneath Ceaseless Skies). But those stories are all very different, and I’m not even sure anybody else would link them together as coming from the same sources of inspiration.

  I will say a little more about herons, though, because they really are the apex predators of your local pond. Great blue herons will eat any living thing that fits in their mouth—fish, rodents, insects, snails, crustaceans, amphibians, and even young birds and turtles and snakes.

  If we don’t realize herons are predators, it’s because they don’t threaten us. But they definitely have a predator’s eye when they’re stalking the shallows of a pond, stabbing their bill at anything that moves. It wasn’t hard to imagine how frightening they might be if they somehow got as big as the biggest flying birds that ever lived—the South American teratorns of the Miocene that weighed 150 pounds and had wingspans of twenty feet.

  What sort of research does one do for a story like this?

  I did a lot of varied research for this story, and threw a lot of it away. It would have been easy to stuff this story full with all kinds of facts about the geography and wildlife of the American West, the lives of the French voyageurs and trappers, and the culture of the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Earlier, rougher versions of the manuscript included a lot of that.

  Most of the research that stayed in were little things. What did the French call the Rocky Mountains in the 18th century? What do forests in the Pacific Northwest look like? How big can a flying bird plausibly get? What did the native people in the Pacific Northwest eat, and how did they hunt?

  If possible, I always prefer to answer those kinds of questions with research. The world’s a big place, and there are lots of interesting things to learn about it. If I had to make up a name for the French to call the Rocky Mountains, my invention wouldn’t have been as wonderful as the real name in use at the time—Montagne de Pierre Brillante, or Mountains of the Shining Stone.

  What’s next for you?

  More short stories, for the most part. The next big thing will be the second volume of the Machine of Death series of anthologies, which I co-edit with Ryan North and David Malki. The new book is called This Is How You Die, and it’s coming out from Grand Central Publishing in July 2013. It’s got more words, more illustrations, and more variety of stories than the first volume. We challenged writers to take us to some new and exciting places, and they really delivered.

  For more information about either of the books (and for a free PDF of the first one), visit http://www.machineofdeath.net.

  Robyn Lupo has been known to frequent southwestern Ontario with her graduate student husband and elderly dog. She writes, reads, and plays video games. She is personal assistant to three cats.

  Author Spotlight: John Crowley

  Earnie Sotirokos

  “Exogamy” tells a complete story in only five pages. Did you plan on using so few words when you started writing it?

  The story was the result of a query from Ellen Datlow, then fiction editor at Omni magazine of fond memory, to write a short short story about the war between the sexes. It was published along with brief stories by Ursula Le Guin and Thomas M. Disch. So the remit included brevity.

  It seemed that the bond between the characters was strengthened with each sentence. How did you distill those developing emotions into such a small package?

  How I did it lies in what I did. It’s not a mystery, really—you’ve distilled it in your first sentence. To know more than that, you just examine the details. Each one takes a step from fear and loathing to acceptance and dependence.

  Are there any advantages of telling a love story using speculative elements?

  The interest for me was to tell a sort of SF story (it was intended for Omni, after all) that would also embody or entail a romance, a quest story. Of course, most SF stories do entail romances. The tiny SF elements of this story resemble to my mind the SF cast of certain stories from the ’50s or earlier, when SF was the main mode for romance (in the philological or lit-crit sense, certainly not the love-story sense): that is, just enough to flavor it, and announce it as “otherworldly.” As it goes on, those elements drop away, and then so do the fantasy/romance elements, until in the last sentences the story becomes nearly naturalistic or this-worldly, and a human couple drives off into our world. The same movement is in many stories, of course, but I was actually imitating the plan of a wonderful brief novel by Josephine Saxton called The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith. Read it and you’ll see.

  Do you have any advice for up-and-coming writers?

  Here’s the plan: Read very many standard SF and SF/fantasy novels, so many that you can write one straight off in a quasi-trance state. There will always be a market for these, and if they fit the template well enough, they don’t have to be terribly good in any other way; write many many and you may become a good writer tout court, and if you don’t, you will still likely get published and loved (though not rich). Just kidding. Read great work in all genres and languages; read powerful second-rank work ditto, which will teach you the standard tricks more clearly; dream; think; lastly write, keeping in mind that stories are made out of words and sentences and not out of visions and longings.

  What can we expect from you in the future?

  I read this first as “what can we expect from the future” and was about to demur, then read it right. I am writing a novel that will not be finished for some time, and if I talk about it and arouse interest in it, that interest will wither away by the time it appears, and it will seem old-hat when newborn.

  Earnie Sotirokos grew up in a household where Star Trek: The Next Generation marathons were only interrupted for baseball and football games. When he’s not writing copy for radio or reading slush, he enjoys penning fiction based on those influences. Follow him on Twitter @sotirokos.

  Coming Attractions

  Coming up in March, in Lightspeed …

  We’ll have original science fiction by Jake Kerr (“Biographical Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince”) and Rich Larson (“Let’s Take This Viral”), along with SF reprints by Holly Phillips (“Three Days of Rain”) and Angélica Gorodischer (“The Sense of the Circle”).

  Plus, we’ll have original fantasy by Sarena Ulibarri (“The Bolt Tightener”)
and Lisa Tuttle (“The Dream Detective”), and fantasy reprints by Felicity Savage (“Ash Minette”) and Karen Joy Fowler (“Lily Red”).

  For our ebook readers, our ebook-exclusive novella will be “Things Undone” by John Barnes, and of course we’ll have our usual assortment of author and artist spotlights, along with feature interviews with bestselling authors Philip Pullman and Angélica Gorodischer.

  It’s another great issue, so be sure to check it out. And while you’re at it, tell a friend about Lightspeed. Thanks for reading!

  If You Enjoyed This Issue of Lightspeed …

  If you enjoyed this issue of Lightspeed, you may also be interested in editor John Joseph Adams’s recent anthologies:

  The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination

  edited by John Joseph Adams

  Tor Books, February 2013

  www.johnjosephadams.com/mad-scientists-guide

  Mad scientists have never had it so tough. In superhero comics, graphic novels, films, TV series, video games and even works of what may be fiction, they are besieged by those who stand against them, devoid of sympathy for their irrational, megalomaniacal impulses to rule, destroy or otherwise dominate the world as we know it.

  Dr. Frankenstein was the first truly mad scientist of the modern era. And where did it get him? Destroyed by his own creation. And Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, a man ahead of his time as well as out of his head, what did he do to deserve persecution?

  Even Lex Luthor, by all counts a genius, has been hindered not once, not twice, but so many times that it has taken hundreds of comic books, a few films and no fewer than ten full seasons of a television series to keep him properly thwarted.

  It’s just not fair. So those of us who are so twisted and sick that we love mad scientists have created this guide. Some of the names have been changed to protect the guilty, but you’ll recognize them. But it doesn’t matter. This guide is not for you. It’s for them, the underhanded, over-brained, paranoiacs who so desperately need our help.